A letter to the Bozeman city attorney

I e-mailed this to city attor­ney Greg Sullivan a few min­utes ago. I post it here in the hopes that oth­ers will send sim­i­lar e-mails ques­tion­ing the City of Bozeman’s pol­icy of ask­ing for social net­work­ing pass­words on a waiver for city job appli­cants’ crim­i­nal back­ground checks. I also sent it to the local news­pa­per and tele­vi­sion station.

Mr. Sullivan,

I watched the KBZK news story about the city’s hir­ing prac­tices, espe­cially the crim­i­nal back­ground check. I’m con­cerned that ask­ing poten­tial employ­ees for their Web pass­words and user­names is an ille­gal vio­la­tion of pri­vacy, and I hope you’ll answer a few ques­tions about the policy.

1. When was the pol­icy enacted? In other words, exactly when did the city begin ask­ing poten­tial employ­ees for their passwords?
2. Do all poten­tial employ­ees fill out the crim­i­nal back­ground check waiver, or only employ­ees who have been pro­vi­sion­ally offered a job?
3. If all employ­ees must fill out the back­ground check waiver, then what hap­pens to the paper­work for the appli­cants who later do not become city employ­ees? That is to say, how many peo­ple have given the city their account names and pass­words who did not later get a job with the city? Are their records pro­tected in secure files, as you say the city employ­ees’ records are? Are they shred­ded, burned, oth­er­wise destroyed?
4. What impact does it have on a person’s chances of obtain­ing a city job if that per­son refuses to fill out that por­tion of the back­ground check waiver, cit­ing pri­vacy prin­ci­ples? Must a poten­tial employee fill that sec­tion out in order to be con­sid­ered for employment?
5. What hap­pens if it is dis­cov­ered that a per­son lied on that appli­ca­tion and listed no Web accounts when, in real­ity, that per­son had accounts?
6. For the peo­ple hired to the city before this became a pol­icy: If those peo­ple have Facebook accounts or other sim­i­lar Web ser­vice accounts, have they been asked to sub­mit their pass­words and user­names to the city to keep on file? Or are those peo­ple per­mit­ted to have social media accounts with­out city oversight?
7. Exactly who gets to see an applicant’s pri­vate Web data? Names and titles would be nice to have.
8. Explain how it can pos­si­bly be fair for a per­son to place trust in city employ­ees and give pass­words to their per­sonal Web accounts when the appli­cant is clearly not trusted to be an adult on those sites? In other words, what makes the city employ­ees fair judges of accept­able behav­ior on social net­work­ing sites?
9. Have city employ­ees been trained in pri­vacy mat­ters and sen­si­tiv­ity issues when it comes to social net­work­ing sites? If train­ing has been done, who did the train­ing, and exactly which city employ­ees received that train­ing. How much did any such train­ing cost the city?
10. Have city employ­ees been trained to nav­i­gate and use every sin­gle social net­work­ing site that an appli­cant could list on that waiver, or will the employ­ees be bum­bling around in sites they have never heard of before?
11. How much time does a city employee on a hir­ing com­mit­tee spend on each social net­work­ing site listed by the appli­cant? Hours? Minutes?
12. Is pro­vid­ing such infor­ma­tion on the waiver required?
13. As the KBZK reporter pointed out to you, the state con­sti­tu­tion grants Montanans a right to pri­vacy unless the state can show a com­pelling inter­est to over­come that right. Please explain why this pol­icy con­sti­tutes a “com­pelling state interest.”
14. Finally, you said sev­eral times in the KBZK inter­view that the city looks for “very spe­cific infor­ma­tion” (you used that word­ing twice) about appli­cants. Please list the spe­cific things you look for on those sites. If you have a rubric for deter­min­ing a person’s trust­wor­thi­ness, moral char­ac­ter or oth­er­wise accept­abil­ity, please attach it to your response.

As a con­cerned cit­i­zen of Bozeman, I hope that you’ll take the time to respond to each of these ques­tions and attach any rel­e­vant links, memos, or legal doc­u­ments explain­ing this policy.

–Michael Becker